ASSENT AND DISSENT

Faith is one of the theological virtues. Though the Christian Tradition describes the act of faith in different ways, an early definition comes from St. Augustine (354-430). In his book on the predestination of the saints (De Praedestinatione Sanctorum), Augustine said that “belief means to think with assent.”

The term “assent” derives from the Latin verb assentire, which is linked etymologically to sententia, a word that means a way of thinking or a strong opinion. To assent, then, means to possess a clear and certain conception of one side of an implied contradiction: The person who assents to something affirms the truth of a proposition, for example, that Jesus Christ is true God and true man, so as to exclude the opposite position, namely, that Christ is only one or the other.

St. Thomas Aquinas elaborated on St. Augustine’s definition. In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas emphasizes that Christian belief encompasses an assent ordered to knowing what is true. “To ponder with assent is distinctive of the believer,” he wrote, “for this is how the believer’s act of belief is set off from all other acts of the mind concerned with the true or false” (2a2ae q. 2, art. 1). Believing assent describes the interior act of faith, that which occurs in both the heart and the mind of the person who accepts the truth of the Catholic faith. “The disciple of Christ must not only keep the faith and live on it, but also profess it, confidently bear witness to it, and spread it” (CCC 1816). The act of belief forms the basis for faith’s outward expression, which we traditionally refer to as the “confession” of the faith. St. Thomas further teaches that both of these actions, which flow from the virtue of faith, express what the Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Romans 1:5, calls “the obedience of faith” (143).

Adherence to God • Assent points to the absolute, religious firmness of belief in God’s word. However, to think or ponder with assent does not mean that the act of faith only engages the mind. Following the clear witness of the New Testament and the theological tradition that develops out of it, the Catechism notes that “faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God” (150). Still, faith begets knowledge, one “more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie” (157). God’s veracity, or truthfulness, controls the theological virtue of faith in a way that distinguishes it from the virtues of theological hope and charity. So the Church has made her own the phrase of Aquinas: “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace” (Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 2, art. 9; cited in Vatican Council I, Dei Filius, 3, and in CCC 155).

As Christian believers, we accept as conclusive what the true God has revealed to us. The communication of divine truth occurs in a series of historical acts wherein God has spoken to mankind, first through the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Law and now, definitively, in Christ, his “Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Heb 1:2).
Because Christ, the Word made Flesh, completes the work of Revelation (cf. Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 4), Christians recognize that faith entails “a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed” (CCC 150). In other words, Christian faith is not contentless; indeed, it requires an assent to a very specific content, which expresses the economy of salvation that God has chosen to reveal. For this reason, heresy, which is a kind of infidelity, entails choosing among the ordinances of faith. The heretic, “though he intends to assent to Christ, fails in his choice of the things involved in that assent, because he chooses, not what Christ really bequeathed, but what his own mind suggests” (Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 11, art. 1).

Because the communion of faith requires the unity of truth, “in the Christian faith, knowledge and life, truth and existence are intrinsically connected” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, 1 [1990]). So the Church wisely specifies for her members different degrees of assent appropriate for different levels of teaching proposed by the Magisterium.
Since the virtue of faith unites the believer immediately to God, the assent of theological faith is required whenever the ordinary and universal Magisterium proposes for belief a teaching of faith that is divinely revealed. Other truths, even if not divinely revealed, can still be proposed by the Magisterium in a definitive way. As related to the assent of faith, these truths must be firmly accepted and held. At other times, the Magisterium teaches truths that help us better to understand God’s Revelation, by making explicit its content, or recalling that some teaching is in conformity with the truths of faith, or by guarding against ideas that are incompatible with these truths. In such matters, the Church asks for the religious submission of the believer’s will and intellect (cf. Canon 752).

The Problem of Dissent • Whereas the Church has confronted heresy from her earliest days, the problem of dissent, which sometimes takes the form of public opposition to the Church’s Magisterium, is especially the fruit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Philosophical liberalism considered all forms of Church teaching heteronomous and therefore an intrusion on the freedom of inquiry that, so les philosophes alleged, advances the human spirit. Since rationalism makes human intelligence the highest norm for truth, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile acceptance of the principle of heteronomy with Christian belief. For divine truth alone measures theological faith.

Today some theologians, who have been influenced by the principle of heteronomy, make dissent part of their discussion of the act of faith. A commonly accepted view distinguishes between a dogma and a doctrine and further asserts that, whereas dissent against a dogma amounts to an act of heresy, it is often difficult in practice to distinguish a dogma from a doctrine, even one officially taught by the Church. The saints would have found this argument bewildering. Someone like St. Thomas Aquinas would have inquired, “But why should someone want to dissent from God?”

The problem of dissent has become so acute that in 1990 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a special instruction dealing with the issue. The Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian rejects the view that “the documents of the Magisterium . . . reflect nothing more than a debatable theology” and criticizes the “ ‘parallel magisterium’ of theologians” that purports to operate in opposition to and in competition with the Magisterium of the pastors of the Church.

The document concludes: “The freedom of the act of faith cannot justify a right to dissent. In fact this freedom does not indicate at all freedom with regard to the truth but signifies the free self-determination of the person in conformity with his moral obligation to accept the truth. The act of faith is a voluntary act because man, saved by Christ the Redeemer and called by him to be an adopted son, cannot adhere to God unless, drawn by the Father” (Jn 6:44), he offer God the rational homage of his faith (no. 36).

See: Dissent; Divine Revelation; Economy of Salvation; Faith, Virtue of; Heresy; Magisterium; Modernism; Relativism; Religion, Virtue of; Sacred Tradition.
Suggested Readings: CCC 150, 156-159, 167, 186-189, 199-202, 512, 815, 1813-1816. Vatican Council I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, Chs. III-IV. Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. A. Dulles, S.J., The Assurance of Things Hoped For. R. Cessario, O.P., Theological Faith and the Christian Life.

Romanus Cessario, O.P.




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 03:24:19 PM